LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

Fair, but NASA facilities would be one of the organizations I would personally expect there to be an exception. They have all sorts of facilities where on-premise servers and capacity will be a lot better than some remote cloud offering.

mrbluecoat• 2 years ago

JPL would be a national loss. I hope it doesn't come to that. Stay safe, SoCal folks!

fidotron• 2 years ago

No joke.

I hope these days it's more spread out and backed up, but at one point they did a lot of phyical archiving related to space exploration there, including huge amounts of transparencies.

markus_zhang• 2 years ago

I hope nothing will be damaged! Those are priceless treasures.

throwup23815• 2 years ago

All the big campuses here like JPL and the Getty are built for this (it’s more or less standard now for insuring anything high value). They have landscaping designed to slow down fires, dedicated water systems, and firebreaks all around the buildings. The civilian evacuation order is because the area south of the fire is densely built up with single family homes without much in the way of defenses and JPL has to comply with that.

Thankfully the wind has died down significantly from last night, so we’re in a better shape, but there are still high wind warnings till 6pm and the fires are 0% contained.

cindycindy• 2 years ago

Will look into options for supporting these folks. Thank you for the level-headed and informative response.

I prefer HN over some other news sources, which seem less concerned about presenting information to the degree the news article can vouch for. Media literacy is a two-way street and we need better reporting standards. If reading and writing is a lot like parsing, then anyone who spreads misinformation is just a parsehole.

bragr4• 2 years ago

The Getty Villa has reported that some landscaping burned, but the buildings and collections are safe.

https://www.sfgate.com/la/article/getty-villa-threatened-pal...

kaycebasques2• 2 years ago

Map of evacuation zones: https://protect.genasys.com/Search?z=9.689266971108566&latlo...

Looks like 3 independent fires?

0xffff22• 2 years ago

Yep, 3 separate fires. The first in West LA blew up late yesterday afternoon and blew through a bunch of residential areas by the looks of it. From watching Flight Radar, it seems to be getting most of the air resources, although that could just be because wind conditions are favorable on that fire today. The second fire near Pasadena started yesterday as well, but really blew up overnight. The third fire up North I think started overnight.

There's been a huge amount of wind throughout So Cal today and yesterday that is driving the rapid spread of these fires.

Gibbon12• 2 years ago

I saw a video of of it burning down down houses and commecial building Altedena, unlike newscasts where the lip flappers are blabbing over everything you could hear the wind howling and see streams of embers blowing down the street and overhead.

kaycebasques2• 2 years ago

There are 4 now (can no longer edit my original comment)

Edit: seems like 5 now. Another one near Hollywood

magic_smoke_ee• 2 years ago

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2025/1/7/palisades-fire

Edit: And hotspots - https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.21,3...

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

With much of California, Texas and Florida property damage is concentrated where folks built where they shouldn’t have [1]. (At times nudged on by subsidised insurance [2].)

Is that true in this case, too? (Being so close to LA, it doesn’t strike me that it could be.) If not, is my general thesis off?

[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/11/06/1204923950/arizona-california...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218...

Dalewyn4• 2 years ago

Deserts are generally uninhabitable by their very nature, but these persistent fires are primarily due to lack of proper underbrush care and other preventative measures.

California fires are a classic case of "We tried nothing and we're out of ideas!", speaking as a former Californian I honestly think the faster solution at this point is for enough of the state to burn down that pretending the problem doesn't exist is no longer good enough.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

Deserts are generally uninhabitable by their very nature

Deserts don’t have wildfires. (EDIT: They do!)

linotype2• 2 years ago

As a current Californian we really don’t need that right now.

mulmen28• 2 years ago

This is wrong. California may not do enough to mitigate fire damage but they are certainly doing more than nothing.

grumple• 2 years ago

Your thesis is way off, and people didn’t understand climate back when these areas were settled. And really, we still don’t know how to or can’t politically manage wildfires well.

Part of climate change is that this man-induced change is making previously hospitable areas much less so.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

people didn’t understand climate back when these areas were settled

Agree on Palisades. My original thesis is about new construction in Florida and Houston and in e.g. the middle of the California woods. That is settlement done when we did know the risks.

downrightmike• 2 years ago

And all the maps are political, like houston is no where near correct, its all flood zone

timewizard3• 2 years ago

we still don’t know how to or can’t politically manage wildfires well.

Fire is oxygen plus fuel. We entirely know how to manage it.

esalman8• 2 years ago

They've actually stopped permitting new builds or rebuild of burned houses in Santa Ana mountains since last year's airport fire.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

Huh, I’m actually surprised a high-risk area is that close to LA. (Santa Monica, no less.)

xoa• 2 years ago

To start with the last first, I would argue your general (and not uncommon) thesis is off in one key respect: it's not primarily (though in some percentage it may be) a matter of people building where they shouldn't have per se, but that they built what they shouldn't have where they did. Ie, it's 100% feasible as a matter of architecture/engineering/construction to build a structure that will shrug off a Cat 5 hurricane including storm surge. And while it adds a real premium, it's also not at some impossible cost either. People have done it, and it works. Same with most other natural disasters. It's "only" a matter of cost and standards. It's worth noting too in many cases societies have indeed done exactly that, like with earthquakes, or in areas of high risk tornadoes. Building standards have been set to match the risk. There is plenty of low hanging fruit that can severely diminish the impact of a lot of the disasters causing massive damage if it's just standard upfront.

Also, there's the complete polar opposite approach: build something "disposable". In the "old days" (including with my extended family) there was a style of "summer camp" for example that was ultra simple. Some small single floor deal, uninsulated, maybe some power but often not even that, composting/pit toilet, some simple wood furniture, that's it. People bring their own everything, be there for a few weeks/months a year, and then go home. Such a structure can't survive much of anything but that doesn't matter because it's so cheap, if it burns/blows down/washes away once every 5 years or whatever so be it. It's a problem though when people convert what should be cheap into some full fledged thing, but then don't take environment into account.

I think this distinction is super important, because a lot of these places are beautiful and desirable much of the time, and a blanket "no you shouldn't build there ever" isn't likely to be heeded and does not get to the root actual problem, which is that the true costs of doing so aren't being priced in. The reasons for that distortion are myriad, but that's the actual issue. I think it's much more productive and convincing to the public to say "it's fine to build where you like, but it's not fine to hit other people up for money to cover it or cause unreasonable costs to safety services/environmental damage (homes burning or floating away means massive pollution), you just need be responsible in how you build."

FWIW to specifics:

With much of California, Texas and Florida it seems pretty clear people built where they shouldn’t have.

In some cases sure but in others I guess it'd be reasonable to say that things built long enough before anthropogenic global warming really kicked off can't be reasonably blamed for that, particularly if they correct gauged the risk for themselves (ie, someone built something 50 years ago as a life thing and it did indeed last the remaining 40 years of their life, well you can't really say they got it wrong and built it wrong or it's still their problem). What is bad though is new stuff getting built or worst of all things getting REbuilt after destruction but not to updated standards each time.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

Are there estimates for the cost of fireproofing Californian construction?

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

I never experienced an earthquake, in Tokyo, but those who have, say that the buildings wave around like drunk dancers.

Things fall off of shelves, but the buildings seem to come out OK.

The Japanese are hard core about building standards.

Compared to other nations (deliberately not gonna name them), that have corruption problems, as well as frequent earthquakes, you always have a bunch of buildings fall down, there's a surge of anger, a couple of unpopular scapegoats get jailed, then, it happens again, the next time.

I have a bunch of friends in the LA area. So far, none of them have been in the line of [literal] fire, but everyone is freaking out. These fires are under no control, whatsoever.

wk_end• 2 years ago

Unfortunately there's increasingly few places where natural disasters, of one sort or another, aren't inevitable. The PNW also burns regularly now, never mind the enormous earthquake looming under us that we're terribly unprepared for. Even the northeast is starting to get buried in smoke in the summer and hit by storms like Hurricane Sandy. Tornado Alley knocks out much of the midwest. What's left of the US? Desert and mountains?

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

there's increasingly few places where natural disasters, of one sort or another, aren't inevitable

Sure. That doesn’t mean you can’t mitigate damage.

Not e.g. building on the Houston flood plain is one such example [1].

[1] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...

esalman8• 2 years ago

South Texas? We lived in San Antonio for last 5 years, and the weather does not really get extreme. Well you get consecutive weeks of 105-110 highs in summer. But it is far enough from the gulf coast so no hurricanes, and apart from the 2021 snowpocalypse, we didn't get any extreme weather. Austin is also okay. If you get too far north up to Dallas you start to get the snowstorms and tornadoes though.

kesslern• 2 years ago

Nobody wants to live here, but Ohio is pretty safe. There are tornadoes but they're very localized and not common. Really not much else to worry about, aside from being in Ohio of course.

umanwizard2• 2 years ago

Phoenix and Tucson are pretty mild for disasters. There are sometimes violent storms in the late summer but nothing that ever rises to the level of requiring evacuation as far as I know.

On the other hand, you better hope your AC works in the summer.

jandrewrogers9• 2 years ago

This has been well-studied by disaster recovery and business continuity boffins. There are sites that are known to be (1) effectively disaster-free, whether earthquakes, severe weather, volcanoes, tsunamis, wildfires, flooding, etc, and (2) sufficiently connected to commerce and the economy that you can reasonably build and fully operate a business from there. Climate change has relatively little impact on the suitability of these sites, both in theory and in terms of modeled scenarios.

The two cities I’ve seen most commonly used for these purposes are San Antonio and Salt Lake City. Phoenix and Las Vegas are also sometimes used. Most of the sites are in the western US away from the coasts. I believe parts of the upper midwest are also sometimes used for these purposes, though these areas have to contend with extreme cold (which is more difficult to deal with than extreme heat).

gamblor9567• 2 years ago

Many of these houses are decades old and were built in areas that weren't fire risks when the houses were built; Altadena had the opposite problem: it generally received a lot of rain so people were concerned about flooding and mudslides and so a lot of the infrastructure is designed to maximize the channeled flow of water down the hillsides.

Also, a lot of the houses burning in the Eaton fire (especially in Altadena) are surrounded by miles of development, but very-low-humidity hurricane-strength Santa Ana wind gusts can carry (and keep alive) burning embers for miles.

timewizard3• 2 years ago

Presumably that property is worth more in the first place. Damage by value is a poor metric to use here. Aside from that is there any indication that the fires occur because people "build where they shouldn't have?" Or is it just the case that more "value" is destroyed when a fire eventually reaches them?

IvyMike• 2 years ago

The Eaton fire is currently destroying Altadena in what I would call regular neighborhoods on regular streets. On a good day, it's like 20 minutes from Downtown LA. It's hard to fathom. https://www.reddit.com/r/pasadena/comments/1hwv3od/much_of_a...

tzs• 2 years ago

I took a look at a map of the Eaton fire and its evacuation area and warning area, then looked up several houses for sale in those areas on Redfin. Redfin includes a section that lists environmental risks.

In the northern parts of Altadena it says the fire risk is 33% chance of a fire within the next 30 years. Going south toward Pasadena it gets lower. At the southern parts of the evacuation zone I'm seeing it mostly range from "minimal" to numbers under 1%. "Minimal" is the category for the places with the least risk, and is described as "Unlikely to be in a wildfire in the next 30 years".

In the warning zone south of that, which looks like to goes south to the 210, so far all I've found is "Minimal".

sapphicsnail• 2 years ago

I was in Pacific Palisades when the fire started yesterday. I've never seen one spread so fast. It went from there being smoke way in the distance and people going about their lives normally, then 90 minutes later the fire was everywhere and people were panicking and evacuating en masse.

tylerflick• 2 years ago

It’s definitely the worst fire I’ve ever seen here. Very surreal to watch houses burning while walking my dogs this morning. The only silver lining are the winds blowing the smoke out to sea rather than blanketing Santa Monica.

bragr4• 2 years ago

I have a good view of the smoke column from Brentwood. I've also never seen a fire spread that fast. Same thing, in about an hour it went from a small fire to the smoke blocking out the sun.

As a testament to the speed of the winds, I've never seen a smoke column visually move so quickly. Usually at that size and distance, they feel more like static objects.

Edit: I'm preparing to evacuate tonight in case the order comes through. Checking the most recent maps, the fire has burned through almost all of the Palisades and is getting into Brentwood. The fire may also reach Santa Monica at this rate. I'm stacking go bags by the door.

earnestinger4• 2 years ago

What is burning? Mostly bushes or mostly homes?

ed• 2 years ago

Folks say the same thing about the 1991 Oakland firestorm. If there's a fire in your area, pay attention and don't assume it'll be contained, the situation can change very quickly.

darth_avocado5• 2 years ago

I was in a wildfire once. I was in a grocery store and I didn’t see anything burning. 2 minutes into the store, another person came in saying they saw smoke a few blocks away. I immediately left the store and went back to the car. Before I could leave the parking lot, everything around me was on fire, there was smoke so dense I couldn’t see anything beyond 10 feet and I genuinely thought I was going to die, if not in the fire, then in an accident. Wildfires move very fast and every second is precious.

culi6• 2 years ago

Especially in this wind. Some of the strongest Santa Ana winds in a century

throwup23815• 2 years ago

I live south of the evacuation warning zone and the wind and fires have turned the entire San Gabriel Valley into an apocalyptic scene. Detritus littered all over the roads (with tons of dry flammable eucalyptus branches, yay!) and there’s ash falling from the sky in big flakes. Air quality in the tank though it was even worse a few hours ago and everything smells like smoke.

This is the worst fire I’ve seen in SoCal since the Valley fire.

trhway10• 2 years ago

One can imagine an IR monitoring (satellite or high flying drones like Reaper, one drone can see an IR source like a tank from 100km, so it would take just a few drones to monitor the the whole state for fires) with [almost] automated immediate dispatching of the fleet of drones (not small quadcopters, more like WWII size bombers) once the fire is detected. Would be much cheaper than having multi-billion dollar fires every year (these LA fires have already hit $50B as of today).

jkaptur3• 2 years ago

https://wifire.ucsd.edu/firis-in-depth

trhway10• 2 years ago

they use manned planes for monitoring - very costly and not scalable. And there is no "water-bombing" drone fleet. The manned "water-bombers" are extremely expensive, there is only small number of them and they actually carry pretty small amount of water as they are mostly helicopters or retrofitted passenger planes.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

it would take just a few drones per the whole state

What are you basing this on? Being able to see something once you know it’s there is a different problem from detecting it in the first place.

trhway10• 2 years ago

there is no issue in detecting. You sweep the area. The IR sources like a tank - pops up like Xmas tree even on relatively cheap IR from 10km (there is a lot of footage from Ukraine war for example). A house fire would easily pop-up even from tens of km. A acre size fire - it would pop-up even on coarse grain IR from space.

lm284692• 2 years ago

It's the classic tech cultist mentality, they imagine the world is just like their little code base and it's just a matter of tweaking a few lines to solve the problem.

They're the real world "ignore friction, air resistance, &c." of kids physics exercises books.

esalman8• 2 years ago

There's no air support to contain fire because of dangerously high wind. Asking for drones now is like a dumb person's idea of cheap science fiction.

JumpCrisscross14• 2 years ago

I think they’re talking about dousing when it first lights. That isn’t “a dumb person’s idea.” But it is presently beyond our capabilities, to say nothing of the huge privacy problem it would entail.

nomel2• 2 years ago

Asking for drones now

He did not. It would be worth re-reading his comment. He's pointing out that we do have technology that could help with containment: quickly identify fires, communicate their location, and dispatch some local water carriers. He's also surmising that the cost of keeping these active would be less than the cost of damages, which could very well be true.

Something like a Reaper drone, which he specifically mentions, works fine in the wind, as do the water carriers, that fly at hundreds of miles an hour, that have been actively helping this whole time.

I think this is probably all true, but probably not the future since it would require a competent state government who embraces tech.

crazygringo• 2 years ago

You're currently being downvoted, but I'm genuinely curious -- is continuous IR monitoring from the sky an effective way to detect wildfires earlier?

Or are small fires indistinguishable from a million other hot objects, until the point where they get large enough to detect reliably, it's already obvious to everyone on the ground from the smoke?

0xffff22• 2 years ago

Yes, it is effective. We have several NASA/NOAA satellites with IR instruments on them that are used for fire detection. These are obviously much more useful for detecting fires that start in very rural areas under moderate conditions. The current crop of fires in LA are all very close to populated areas and spread fast, so satellite mapping wasn't of any use for detection. Also, California in particular has a really great fleet of IR mapping planes that give firefighters and the public much more detailed fire information than the satellite coverage, but when I lived in Oregon where they don't have a similar system, the satellite coverage was often the most up to date information on fire perimeters.

atonse• 2 years ago

I'm not so sure. In nVidia's keynote, they had an example of small smoke plumes identified as potential fires. If you had a drone hovering over a particular city to monitor fires, it could potentially be an early warning system, no?

And to others that said that the winds are dangerous, do quadcopter drones (which tend to be more stable anyway) have algorithms to account for that?

bsder• 2 years ago

It could be for fires on normal weather days.

The problem is that with these winds and humidity small fires become huge fires before anybody can react. Once they are huge fires, detection isn't the problem.

carabiner3• 2 years ago

Your cost analysis is both thorough and thought-provoking.

gamblor9567• 2 years ago

The problem is not identifying fires. That's the easy part. As I watched the local news last night, I was able to watch (along with the anchors) the real-time growth of the Eaton fire from a tiny fire near the campgrounds into a behemoth. This morning, the local news covered the real-time development of 2 new fires (both were quickly contained).

The problem is fighting fires in steep, mountainous terrain filled with dryed out brush and trees when the winds are so strong (hurricane-strength gusts) that you can't provide any air support. The problem is that the winds were so strong last night and this morning that burning embers in the air could fly to and light structures miles away (which is how most of the current fires in Altadena started).

chiph• 2 years ago

Some coworkers had to evacuate. One of them was woken up last night by their doorbell camera sending multiple alerts because of the high winds.

I hope everyone gets to safety.

Gibbon12• 2 years ago

Friend of mine had to evacuate and then watched his house burn down on the news.

segasaturn6• 2 years ago

Los Angeles Fire Department funding was cut by over $23M only a few months ago. The fires are currently being fought by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers. Can't say if that funding would have prevented it, but cutting it definitely has not helped.

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/los-angeles-fires-m...

Edit: Changing a word, "gutted" -> "cut"

defrost12• 2 years ago

Someone tweeted $23 million .. your linked article (thank you for source) follows that with:

  City budget documents show the department’s more than $800 million budget decreased by around $17 million compared to the previous budget cycle.

Which makes the cuts less than %2.12

"Gutted" as a descripter seems extreme and the details that matter are whether these reductions simply trimmed fat, or denied something essential that would have made all the difference here.

segasaturn6• 2 years ago

I'm not sure why the percentage matters? Whether it's 2% or 20%, it's still millions of dollars that could have been used here. More broadly, why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent, more intense and a year round phenomenon due to global warming? If you want to trim fat in the government there are much bigger targets to go after than an essential service like firefighting.

Twirrim• 2 years ago

Agreed. I don't see anything from a google search that suggests that they cut the number of firefighters, either.

Hyperbolic statements like "gutted" are just meant to get the knee jerk, frothing at the mouth "retweet" kind of reaction, and it seems to be being successful at that.

darth_avocado5• 2 years ago

The problem with that though is that the overall budget includes big ticket items like pensions and overtime. And cuts often directly are from live services. So even though it’s 2% of the overall budget, the cut could still be significant to the availability of firefighters and crucial things like response times.

Nifty3929• 2 years ago

Unfortunately that 2% was the part going to actual firefighters. The other 98% was administrative overhead. Both remaining firefighters are spread thin.

CapricornNoble2• 2 years ago

Regarding what was actually cut, do the cuts include the firefighting equipment sent to Ukraine? Sounds like that was mostly hoses and extra PPE, not major force-multiplier systems needed for this type of fire: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/vital-la-firefighting...

And why is there apparently no water in the fire hydrants? Something about the reservoir not being refilled appropriately?

rayiner6• 2 years ago

That’s on top of about 3.4% inflation from 2023 to 2024. So over a 5% cut in real terms.

coding123• 2 years ago

Inflation in CA over the past 3 years is likely 50% (my personal estimation for necessities is over 100%) If you cut 2%, you're really cutting it by 52%. There's no way someone will want to work for peanuts. It has been gutted.

sneak• 2 years ago

For reference the LAPD budget is $175 million per month.

The fire budget was cut by $17.6 million for the year, the 23M cut was proposed. The police budget was increased by $126M for the year.

For context, the LAFD annual budget is $820M and the LAPD annual budget is $2140M.

ChrisClark• 2 years ago

2% means gutted? 2% less funding means only a skeleton crew is left?

llamaimperative6• 2 years ago

Depends: did it have a lot of excess capacity before the cuts?

segasaturn6• 2 years ago

The city of Los Angeles and the Mayor have been requesting volunteers from the public, due to lack of manpower. According to their website [1] the salary for firefighters in Los Angeles is $85,000 to $125,000 (rounded). Assuming the average ($105,000), that amount of funding could have paid 161 firefighters salaries for the entire year, not including benefits (unsure how that is priced in), and much more than that if they were part-time which most of the force are.

https://www.joinlafd.org/salary-and-benefits

ravenstine2• 2 years ago

I really don't understand how SoCal and California residents in general find the the state's response to wildfires in the last decade to be acceptable. Not only have fire departments seen cutbacks, but so has the forestry needed for preventative measures.

What really bugs me is what I find to be a disinterest and lack of belief in vastly expanding the fleet of water dropping aircraft. Letting fires burn to the extent that they have been isn't cheap, to put it lightly. Somehow, a state that is one of the largest economies in the world can't or won't expand its aerial response such that fires of the scale we are seeing become a thing of the past. With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.

I can anticipate being told this is not possible or too expensive, which is what everyone I know seems to believe, but I don't buy it.

If anyone ever runs for governor and makes my proposal their single issue platform, I will vote for them regardless of political party or whether it is truly feasible up to the extent that I am imagining. Fuck wildfires.

cameldrv• 2 years ago

Buying more firefighting equipment is like building a dam higher and higher every year as the reservoir fills up, instead of letting it drain out gradually. The natural cycle in California is for there to be periodic fires, but due to the policy of suppression, they haven't happened for 70 years or more, so now when they do, they are these massive infernos.

Better and better fire suppression tech over the years that enables a quicker response, like aircraft, satellite monitoring, remote video cameras, etc, has just served to make the problem worse in the long run.

rurp5• 2 years ago

It's not a binary choice between expanding aircraft and doing nothing. I have seen some convincing arguments that firefighting aircraft are mostly for show against large fires. Essentially the amount of water/chemicals they can move is trivial compared to land approaches, and the cost is significant. That doesn't mean that nothing should be done, just that the money should be spent on more effective measures.

Lord knows I'm not going to defend the competence of the CA state govt and I'm sure they could be protecting against wildfires better, but I don't know that railing about the number of aircraft involved will help anything.

fatbird3• 2 years ago

California has a problem with overly aggressive fire suppression over the last 100 years creating a buildup of extra-flammable burnable areas. Literally, you need to let a certain amount of burning go on, continuously over time, so that the burnable areas aren't over-fueled tinderboxes that get very hot, very fast.

Part of this is using controlled burns to mitigate the buildup, another thing that's been under-resourced in California.

I had a discussion at a B and B with a guy who flew F-16s in the USAF, then U2s once they were going to promote him out of flying. He'd just left the service and had retrained to fly Grumman water bombers for Calfire. The problem as I've described it is apparently well-known in the wildfire fighting community in Californa.

majormajor2• 2 years ago

How much water do you need to dump enough to saturate all the territory that would need to be covered with wind gusts up to 100MPH? (How do you fly and aim the water in those winds?)

Wildfires are obviously not new, if you're saying the fault is of the administration of the last 10 years, how do you explain that the earlier government for the fifty years prior ALSO failed to see and implement your "just dump the water everywhere from planes" approach to the fires in the 90s, say?

We're, what, 13 years from terrible financials for the state and local governments that forced widespread major cuts and furloughs and reduction in hours? Everyone who's been hit by those can point to negative outcomes somewhere or other (crime is up! education achievement stats are down! wait times are up! etc) but there's no free lunch here to just have avoided any cutbacks in any area.

Syonyk• 2 years ago

Wildfires, unfortunately, have a way of "not caring in the slightest about what people think of them." Throw in the winds of southern CA, and a wildfire can go from "freshly started" to "a few thousand acres" by the time anyone manages to get their boots on and equipment started. You don't fight wildfires in 60-100mph winds. Firebombers can't fly in those winds (or at night, since it's close to terrain), and even if they did, that sort of wind will scatter your drop before it has a chance to do anything useful.

With satellite technology, it should be possible to identify wildfires as they begin and immediately deploy hundreds if not 1000+ planes to dump water from the Pacific and reservoirs, while drones go ahead of them to confirm that an out-of-control fire is actually in progress.

Great, you've just put out the fire, and kicked the can for next time. Even if it did work that way, it doesn't fix the root problem, which is simply:

Many western forests need to burn. Not in the sort of uncontrolled canopy fires we see with this sort of situation, but a lower, "clean the brush out, candle off some weaker trees, and open up the seeds" sort of fire. The problem is, for most of the past century, we haven't been allowing them to burn. Wildfire fighting in the US really ramped up and became a capable force with the post-WWII surplus - Jeeps, bombers that could be bought for nothing and converted to fire bombers, cheap spotting aircraft. So, for about 80 years, we've been fighting fires - or, explained differently, "We've been letting fire load build up for 80 years." When those areas light, with most of a century worth of buildup, they go off like a bomb, and your option in high winds is to "get out of the way."

You cannot allow endless fuel growth in a forest without consequences - and we're out of runway on that. All the aerial firefighting in the world won't fix that problem, because it's not the problem that needs fixing.

mulmen28• 2 years ago

The wind is too high for aerial firefighting. You could have every firefighting plane in the world in LA right now and it wouldn't matter. None of them can fly.

Do you have some reason to believe more planes is the best allocation of resources?

nradov7• 2 years ago

California recently acquired several C-130H firefighting aircraft. These are extremely expensive platforms and while they're useful for fast response in some scenarios they're hardly a complete solution. For these particular fires the winds were often too strong for air tankers to fly. Effective fire prevention and suppression requires a variety of different solutions. It would be foolish to focus on a single issue.

https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/26/c-130-hercules-is-now-figh...

jonstewart• 2 years ago

Hundreds or thousands of planes???

“Federal agencies are responsible for managing 200 to 300 wildland fire aircraft.” - Nat’l Interagency Fire Center, https://www.nifc.gov/resources/aircraft

“CAL FIRE’s fleet of more than 60 fixed and rotary wing aircraft make it the largest civil aerial firefighting fleet in the world.” — CAL FIRE, https://www.fire.ca.gov/what-we-do/fire-protection/aviation-...

perihelions2• 2 years ago

Not an expert: I think one of the issues is that there's only a handful[0] of satellites with the appropriate infrared instruments, which means that any given point of Earth is only sampled at a multiple-hour cadence.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_Information_for_Resource_...

It's a generic problem for any sensing problem that's real-time + low-orbit.

I speculate adding instruments to large LEO constellations, en masse, would solve that problem—though I have no clue if that's practical. (Perhaps if the same instrument were doing other kinds of real-time imaging, you could piggyback wildfire alerts on that datastream, and the get the functionality essentially for free?)

edit: More info:

- "Geostationary satellite sensors view the same area of Earth’s surface at all times while polar-orbiting sensors, such as MODIS and VIIRS, typically view the same area of Earth’s surface twice daily. Consequently, geostationary satellite sensors can provide repeated observations on a sub-hourly basis, making it possible to detect fires which may not be detected at longer temporal intervals. Geostationary satellites provide data at 10-15 minute intervals, so they can detect more fire events and capture their growth and change. However, the spatial resolution of geostationary satellite data is coarser and therefore less sensitive to small fires."

https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/firms/faq

crystal_revenge• 2 years ago

by a skeleton crew of remaining fire fighters and volunteers.

I think you're missing a major contributor which is California's prison population [0]. Prisoners getting paid around $3-$5 a day make up ~1/3 of California's wildfire fighting service. Maybe you consider them to be "volunteers" but that seems to be missing some important context.

0. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-history-of-califo...

rvnx4• 2 years ago

(Very interesting info you found!)

It seems to be a great way to reengage in the community and feel useful as a human being (and see people being grateful to you).

Not so sure the $5 are the driver here.

Better than watching a cellmate all day.

mistrial9• 2 years ago

this is disinformation. CalFIRE at the State of California had a 10x budget increase in the 2020 time frame under Gov Newsom. LA County has budgets larger than small countries. Fire suppression is a priority.

These fires have spread quickly and it is true that fire fighters are spread thin.

dawnerd2• 2 years ago

Exactly. There's only so much they can do. They couldn't fly aircraft. Spread to a huge area rapidly, the area isn't even that easy to get in/out of on a good day. Add in another couple fires that also rapidly spread and it really doesn't matter how much money they had, you can't just bring on firefighters that fast.

I'm glad to see all the aircraft are working the fires and hopefully they'll make some good progress before night.

timeon• 2 years ago

I would be more concerned about Climate Change. No amount of money will help.

thepasswordis• 2 years ago

Never allowing the forest to burn, which is a part of its natural cycle, is a form a drastic climate change for the forest.

Proper management of the forest means selecting a time to do these burns. If we don't select a time, mother nature will select one for us.

Yes, global temperature rise is real, and could potentially have had some effect on the fire. Completely disrupting the natural cycle of the forest is a much bigger deal.

Rebelgecko2• 2 years ago

This is slightly misleading because it doesn't take into account the extra funding they got when contract negotiations finished

UncleOxidant• 2 years ago

Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, slammed Bass in an X post claiming the mayor slashed the Los Angeles Fire Department’s budget, despite the high risk of wildfires in the region, and raised questions about reports that some fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades had run dry.

It's kind of rich that a local billionaire would complain about this. I'm going to guess that the $23M was cut due to budget shortfalls. Maybe if the billionaires and multi-millionaires in the area were willing to pay their fair share that wouldn't have happened.

baggy_trough5• 2 years ago

"fair share" is always defined as more than they pay now, I've noticed.

mmooss• 2 years ago

Soon-Shiong has aligned with Trump, and is openly forcing LA Times journalists to serve his interests. Usually a major newspaper owner would try to avoid the appearance of bias or of undermining the objectivity of the news.

https://www.thewrap.com/la-times-case-against-trump-kamala-e...

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5163293/la-times-editor...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/18/la-times-patri...

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

There is no meaningful sense in which firefighters are "fighting" this fire, nor could they.

culi6• 2 years ago

Interesting that at the same time the police department's budget increased by $126 million

jillesvangurp• 2 years ago

It's of course terrible what's happening in LA. But we're talking about a rich area in a rich city in a state that is very rich and I just read an article about some pretty famous people that I've heard off losing their houses that collectively probably have a net worth hundreds of millions (or individually in some cases) that lost their houses. They'll be fine, financially at least. You'd struggle to find a richer place in the world.

Some things that crossed my mind:

- Affected people probably spend way more on personal security, lawyers, dog grooming, plastic surgery, etc. than on fire safety in that area. I.e. all the extravagant nonsense that spoiled millionaires in LA and these areas in LA specifically are famous for spending their money on. I watched the new beverly hills cop movie on Netflix over the summer (not amazing) that makes fun of that specifically.

- Given the string of wild fires specifically in LA in the last few years, how is it that they are not more prepared for this and what genius decided that now was a good moment to cut spending on the fire department? And who voted that clown into office? Oh wait that would be the same people that live there that donate money to all sorts of causes by the bucket load.

That doesn't help the people there right now. And I'm sure there are some people caught up in this that are less well off, which totally sucks. But I'm sure charity events will be organized and I'm sure there will be quite a few millionaires attending and performing at these events.

But my point is that they don't exactly have a lot of excuses for not organizing the most awesome, best funded and equipped fire department in the world. Also, on the prevention side there is probably a thing or two that could have been done to e.g. clear out areas of bone dry bushes, wood, etc. that are well known fire hazards. I don't think there's a lot of ignorance on that front that needs addressing.

this15testing• 2 years ago

also, it has been known for quite some time how damaging the near total reliance on cars and the associated infrastructure at that scale is. If you do absolutely nothing about climate change when you have the most resources to do so, then I cannot feel sorry about anything that's happening.

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

Your source debunked itself a few hours later.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/08/wildfire-threatens-...

This whole subthread should be printed out, preserved, exhibited in museums about the spread of misinformation among gullible Silicon Valley commenters, but also deleted from this site. It's an embarrassment.

383toast• 2 years ago

is there a wildfire tracker?

xeromal3• 2 years ago

https://app.watchduty.org/

This one is pretty good

ninjha01• 2 years ago

Seconding watch duty. Been invaluable as I evacuated. Happily donated/paid the subscription!

jdbrown• 2 years ago

https://www.fire.ca.gov/

tsbischof• 2 years ago

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents

sva_• 2 years ago

You can also search for wildfires in Google maps, but not sure if it is the best data.

username1352• 2 years ago

https://app.watchduty.org/i/40388

onecommentman5• 2 years ago

I’ve used #FireMappers 3.1 by NAPSG Foundation, found at https://napsg.maps.arcgis.com/. Would provide the full link, but the app value in the copied link is suspiciously long.

keane• 2 years ago

#FireMappers 3.1 is found here: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/instant/media/index.html?appid=a...

earnestinger4• 2 years ago

I see there are three separate fires several km apart. How do they start so synchronously?

gamblor9567• 2 years ago

They didn't.

Palisades started Tuesday morning in someone's backyard. The Eaton fire started last evening near one of the campgrounds. The Hearst fire started late last night around 10pm (suspected cause was a vehicle fire from an accident that spread to the side of the road).

harmmonica5• 2 years ago

Hey there, do you have a source for the backyard? I'm not questioning it. I'd like to know the origin and what actually occurred in that yard to cause it.

gamblor9567• 2 years ago

Following up on this: - No source given for the Lidia fire that started in the Angeles National Forest this afternoon.

- A specific house address was given on-air for the Sunset Fire in the Hollywood Hills that started this evening at around 5:40pm. The ABC7 copter crew had actually spotted the fire within the first minute or two of it forming (while they were trying to get in position to cover the Palisades fire after refueling), and (ABC and NBC) broadcast the first hour of the fire's growth (and provided live updates on new flare-ups). They may well have saved Hollywood from burning down.

gamblor9567• 2 years ago

Another followup:

There were several more fires that started on Thursday. Due to the unusual nature of these fires, authorities suspect arson. A person of interest was arrested for one of these fires after being observed trying to start a fire.

llamaimperative6• 2 years ago

The conditions that make one fire likely make others likely too...

Extreme dryness, high wind, failing electrical infrastructure, overburdened emergency response.

Also embers can easily be blown miles away to ignite another "new" fire.

emmelaich2• 2 years ago

There's always a slight chance of arsonists.

Every few years in Australia we get a story of arsonists setting fires. Sometimes they're firefighters, too.

earnestinger4• 2 years ago

There's always a slight chance of arsonists.

Actually, that was my first natural reaction. (Though I do live in the neighborhood of Russia, here probability of foul play is much higher up the list)

Sometimes they're firefighters, too.

That is messed up.

keyle• 2 years ago

Whenever the media announces "extremely high chance of fire" in Australia, there is always at least one fire started. I think maybe we would be better off leaving it off the news.

Some fires are started by glass bottles causing the dry grass underneath to lit up, and then the wind takes care of the rest. But that's really, really rare.

It's most often someone doing something really stupid.

Tell people they can't come out of their house and they go stir crazy to go out... Tell people it's an absolute fire ban and the situation is extremely critical and it only takes 1 nut bag out of the entire population... The odds are high.

mempko3• 2 years ago

Global warming doing it's thing.

nxm• 2 years ago

Wildfires have always occurred, just that mansions are now in the way

gdubs2• 2 years ago

It's a multifaceted problem that includes development decisions, but Climate Change plays a large role in all of this.

llamaimperative6• 2 years ago

"Wildfires didn't occur before humans!" - the straw man who you just beat the daylights out of. Kudos!

llamaimperative6• 2 years ago

why did no one warn us every minute of every day for the last 10 years?!

But fret not, the right wing on Twitter is taking to blaming a minuscule water diversion to protect an endangered fish for the hydrants running dry.

Not the fact that we built a sprawling megalopolis with ultra-expensive infrastructure maintenance costs... in a desert... where we use the vast majority of local water to feed cows...

mulmen28• 2 years ago

10 years? An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, that's nearly two decades and Gore didn't invent climate change any more than he invented the Internet.

reducesuffering• 2 years ago

It is ironic that LA is one of the oldest fossil industry originations, Pacific Palisades probably includes a lot of old LA oil money driving gas guzzling Range Rovers, and that the fire surrounds the Getty Villa of the OG Getty Oil Company.

proc04• 2 years ago

'It will continue to happen until people realize the true root cause which is bad leadership... or continue blaming "climate change" and giving up because we're not changing how much China pollutes the air anytime soon. I would rather at least elect better leaders who have their priorities in order.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

So you're saying you want leaders who address climate change. Bad leaders exacerbate climate change.

As the planet becomes hotter and drier, you will see more fires, unless you address climate change.

China makes all your stuff, including bibles, that's why there is more air pollution there. China is rapidly expanding it's renewables deployment and that will improve their air quality and resilience..

mempko3• 2 years ago

Except China is working damn hard on climate initiatives.

anon-3988• 2 years ago

Small wildfires happens all the time and in fact natural in that region. So much for wanting nature to return to its course, plenty of plants rely on the natural wildfire occurring. But we can't let that happen because we need to build fancy houses here.

Guess whats gonna happen in another 5 years? You're right, another fire. I am pre-ordering my thoughts and prayers right now. Maybe build your house in mud next time?

Its not my problem if you build your house in the literal line of fire. Climate change is still a thing but we can't blame everything on it.

leet_thow• 2 years ago

From Wikipedia:

The Santa Ana winds and the accompanying raging wildfires have been a part of the ecosystem of the Los Angeles Basin for over 5,000 years, dating back to the earliest habitation of the region by the Tongva and Tataviam peoples.

Honest question in good faith: For those that use the reductionist argument of global warming / climate change for every natural disaster, what do they expect to happen if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero? Some kind of climate stasis Garden of Eden scenario?

defrost12• 2 years ago

Imagine a steadily bubbling surface of mixed quasi fluid materials, every thing moves, none the less a pattern of long term "stability" exists wherein various regions have behaviours fixed within local constraints.

California has "behaved" in some manner for twenty thousand years, as has the Pacific North West and the Great lake regions to the north east (in central north america).

Now that the sea+land surface layer has more energy thanks to increased insulation above various parts of the globe are bubbling along more than they have the past; wet forests that have never experienced fire are drying out in a manner previously rare and having fires not experienced in human history, drier areas with a fire cycle (California, Australia) are experiencing more intense and more frequent fire events.

if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero ..

it will take a lag time for the human added insulation to disapear from the atmosphere, when a new stable equilibrium is reached the energy driving the additional bubbling seen so far to date will be gone and the former equilibrium (of dynamic stability) would resume .. for a few thousand years.

mulmen28• 2 years ago

Honest question in good faith: For those that use the reductionist argument of global warming / climate change for every natural disaster, what do they expect to happen if we hypothetically cut all greenhouse gas production to zero? Some kind of climate stasis Garden of Eden scenario?

I think it's more innocent than that and that your characterization is a strawman. Climate change is real and scary. This type of fire might not be abnormal in LA on generational timescales but it is the kind of thing we would expect to see as a consequence of climate change. So even if this type of fire would have happened anyway it is a real manifestation of a real thing people are rightly concerned about. It's also possible that climate change (and/or the politicization of climate change!) made this fire worse.

mempko3• 2 years ago

The idea of a stable ecosystem is a myth. Yes, in hundreds of thousands and millions of years the region will change dramatically. The difference between natural variability and instability is the rate of change. If left to the "natural" cycles and instability of the earth's climate, you would see gradual changes over tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years.

What people like you don't understand is that our man made climate change is 100 to 1000 times faster than anything nature has dealt (except say a meteor hitting the earth).

So yes, the climate has always been unstable over long periods, but never changed as quickly as we are changing it today. We are the meteor now.

tonymet3• 2 years ago

Prayers go out to Snapchat, Riot, Naughty Dog, TigerConnect (nee TigerText) and other West LA / Santa Monica companies whose staff may live in the Palisades , Topanga & Malibu. I remember .XYZ & Headspace are also in the neighborhood.

Any other Silicon Beach companies that I missed?

ApolIllo• 2 years ago

I frequently go past TigerText. I assumed they were related to TigerDirect!

tonymet3• 2 years ago

Tigertext (now -Connect) is a healthcare provider-side messaging company. they started out as ephemeral messaging and pivoted to healthcare.

shreezus• 2 years ago

Google, Oracle, many many others.

I live in the area and have never seen a fire move this rapidly. The high winds were a major culprit.

tonymet3• 2 years ago

they're down in Playa vista though right?

throwaway249281• 2 years ago

There's a lot of fingerpointing but as Daniel Swain put it: 1. This was completely expected and forecasted both short and long term by regional climate and weather experts. Two very wet winters caused fuel buildup followed by an extremely hot and dry year. 2. There is very little that can be done in these situations. 100 mph gusts of embers can't be fought with hoses and air attack isn't possible in high winds. 3. Hard to believe but it could have been a lot worse. Daniel Swain points out there could have been several more major fires like the two big ones but they got put out quickly before they spread. 4. California's climate has likely been this way for millions of years, long before human habitation.

gonzo412• 2 years ago

You need to do fuel reduction burns during winter (when it's wet) so you can reduce the load. They do this near my house in Australia every few years, it's somewhat terrifying to have a slow roll bushfire roll around the house, but it can be managed with care.

dawnerd2• 2 years ago

We do. And we have setbacks you must maintain and keep brush cleared. But there's still only so much you can do.

joe_the_user4• 2 years ago

This was a wealthy area built within canyons and other natural areas. Controlled burns are possible in some areas but I can't imagine it would have been possible there.

scarab922• 2 years ago

Perhaps worth mentioning that Australia is doing less fuel reduction burns than in the past, especially near major urban centres with unfavourably wide directions.

Fuel reduction burning often requires blanketing millions of people with carcinogenic smoke for several weeks each year.

The greater good is to protect everyone’s lungs and accept that every few years we’ll have to rebuild a few homes.

joe_the_user4• 2 years ago

Two very wet winters caused fuel buildup followed by an extremely hot and dry year.

References for the "hot and dry year" ('cause I hear it tossed around a lot). As far as I can tell, all of California had several relatively wet (but hot) years and nothing dry afterwards. I'm linking to NOAA's the California drought map, which shows "Abnormally Dry" (less than "moderate drought") for LA currently and I think showed "none" for much of the year [1].

The thing is, I agree this was to be expected. But only by the principle "climate change is going to cause disaster out of nowhere". We need to say this and let people understand.

[1] https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/CurrentMap/StateDroughtMonito...

culi6• 2 years ago

This was also to be expected in the sense that forecasters for a week now have been warning about century long record wind speeds and the fire dangers those bring along with them

Mistletoe2• 2 years ago

very little that can be done in these situations

I don't agree with that. People can choose to not live there. There is an entire country to live in and we keep crowding in what seem to the worst places to live and then act surprised when it goes badly. Climate change is going to make some places uninhabitable, that's why we tried to prevent it, but no one cares.

mturmon4• 2 years ago

… we keep crowding in what seem to the worst places to live …

Malibu?

Pacific Palisades?

These are among the most pleasant places in the world to live. People are not going to stop wanting to live there — this isn’t a lost cause like a low-lying area exposed to floods. We have to find ways to mitigate the very real fire risk.

saagarjha5• 2 years ago

Where should they live? People living in the Midwest being hit by freezing winters get told to move to warmer weather…then Georgia gets hit by hurricanes. Move to California to avoid those and your house burns down. It turns out that climate change affects weather everywhere.

Izikiel432• 2 years ago

You haven’t been to California right? Weather and location wise, it’s one of the best places in the world to live in

curiousgal2• 2 years ago

There is very little that can be done in these situations.

Ah yes, same response to school shootings; "No way to solve this, says the only country where this happens every year".

There's nothing that special about California that makes it different from many other places around the world with densely populated forested areas that do not get insane wildfires almost every single year.

pjc50• 2 years ago

Australia is now in this situation as well, and we've seen it in Spain. It's just that LA gets way better global news coverage.

BlueTemplar3• 2 years ago

There's nothing special indeed : this shrub biome gets devastated by firestorms on a regularish 30 to 150 years clock (looking at the past 520 years), regardless of what humans do (at least so far, uncertainty over the last few decades is of course high).

wtcactus4• 2 years ago

In the old days, where I live (and I'm guessing most of Mediterranean Europe) we had goats. It was a superb utilization of resources really, goats eat almost any vegetation - even hard bramble - so the shepherds would take them to the forest, and they would eat the vegetation buildup that serves as the fuel for these fires.

That would be a win-win situation for everyone. We would get goat meat/milk for free (minus the shepherd effort) and the forest would be mostly clean.

This is quite rare now. Sure, in some places in the mountains we still have that because life is hard there and there's little else you can get from the land. But it's mostly disappearing.

BlueTemplar3• 2 years ago

Why didn't this happen in this region (over the last half a millennium) ?

No goat equivalent in the Americas ?

Population density too low ?

throwup23815• 2 years ago

Caltrans uses goats to create fire breaks around highways: https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-popular-li...

chris_va• 2 years ago

Map: https://app.watchduty.org/i/40335

blondie9x3• 2 years ago

Most of these wildfires are caused by humans. Not just because of climate change but because of people intentionally starting fires who want to watch the destruction unfold. There were fires near these exact areas where fires in homeless camps were found to be the cause. Not enough was done to enforce the law and stop street people from intentionally causing destruction and being pushing for it.

blondie9x3• 2 years ago

This is happening and we need to discuss solutions - https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/la-homeless-enc...

We also need to discuss clearing plants and other fuel that comes back as part of the drought / rain weather patterns we are seeing. Goats and other firefighting clearing efforts need to be discussed.

blondie9x3• 2 years ago

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-12/surge-in...

immibis5• 2 years ago

We know the solution - just give those people homes - but we don't want to do it because building homes makes them abundant and devalues existing homes.

consumer4515• 2 years ago

NASA's FIRMS site shows the scale of both fires. They are huge given their proximity to the city.

https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/map/#d:24hrs;@-118.57,3...

perihelions2• 2 years ago

Note that some of the small flagged regions are spurious triggers on industrial waste heat (oil refineries, power plants, and something else). There aren't as many fires as that map naively would suggest.

sbohacek• 2 years ago

The relative humidity is 0.33 [1]. The previous lowest recorded relative humidity was 0.36 in Needles CA and Iran [2]

[1] https://www.weather.gov/wrh/timeseries?site=KSMO

[2] https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/world-record-low-humidity-...

earnestinger4• 2 years ago

Maximum being 1 or 100?

BeefWellington• 2 years ago

I believe 100, because lower than 36% humidity is fairly common while lower than 1% is incredibly rare.

jazzyjackson• 2 years ago

The graph and chart indicate it's 0 to 100%, so 0.33 is indeed one third of one percent.

gruez• 2 years ago

What causes the humidity to be so low? Is the fire lowering the humidity? Or the lower humidity causing the fire?

relwin• 2 years ago

Wiki Santa Ana winds. They typically bring <10% humidity as they blow towards the pacific ocean. This can happen overnight and you'll wake up with "raisin-eyes".

volkse• 2 years ago

You have your units mixed up - Iran record is two orders if magnitude lower than in LA (30% vs 0.3%)

kristjansson12• 2 years ago

That’s not what his link [1] shows. Santa Monica airport appears to have reported a relative humidity of 0.33%

martinpw3• 2 years ago

I wonder if there is a problem with the data collection at that time? From your link, it looks like to drop much lower than 0.33, lowest value on that chart is 0.11, which is massively lower than any previous worldwide value, before jumping up to ~10.

username1352• 2 years ago

https://app.watchduty.org/i/40388

Altadena fire

bloudermilk4• 2 years ago

We lost our house to the Eaton fire this morning. It’s difficult to describe the vastness of the destruction in our community. Everything within a couple square miles of us burned.

bamboozled2• 2 years ago

Sorry friend, may your new place be even better.

jondwillis• 2 years ago

That’s devastating, and I hope you can stay strong through the recovery process. As a nearby neighbor a couple of communities over, do you know of anything that I can do or donate to help generally that won’t be a waste/too late? Like donate masks or water or something?

bloudermilk4• 2 years ago

The only guidance I’ve heard so far is that the shelters are in need of bedding. Neither of the press briefings today offered more opportunities for support.

tkgally2• 2 years ago

I feel really sorry for you.

I grew up in north-central Pasadena and had many friends who lived in Altadena, and it’s been heartbreaking to watch the news from a distance and realize that many of their homes might have burned.

tkgally2• 2 years ago

Later: I came across a streamer’s video taken from his motorcycle as he rode through Altadena on Wednesday afternoon. In this part, he passes through a burned-out neighborhood I used to know:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D29RXlm4yE&t=584s

From the street signs, I was able to identify a location where a high school friend of mine lived—the house now burned to the ground. (It’s been nearly fifty years since I graduated from high school, and I don’t know if her family still lives there or not.)

culi6• 2 years ago

I'm sorry for your loss. Are you lucky enough to be in a place where insurers in California are still operating? Hopefully you can at least get financial situation taken off your mind

geysersam• 2 years ago

Are there areas of California where insurers are not operating anymore because of wildfires? That's crazy

throwup23815• 2 years ago

Are you lucky enough to be in a place where insurers in California are still operating?

California has had a state fire insurer (FAIR) of last resort for over fifty years and fire insurance is practically mandatory for mortgages so there aren’t many places that are excluded.

It’s entirely funded by premiums and has never been bailed out by state or federal funds. It’s not like the National Insurance Flood Program that’s burned billions of dollars in federal funding to subsidize people living in flood plains and Florida.

bloudermilk4• 2 years ago

Luckily we insured through the California State Fair plan. FEMA may also be able to provide some assistance. We’re learning as much as we can as fast as we can, but it can be difficult to source accurate information. Thank you for your kindness.

ramshanker• 2 years ago

What was the major building material? Wood or Concrete? I hear wood houses are a lot more popular in US.

Sorry for your loss.

gcanyon• 2 years ago

Most houses in the US are made of wood. In Los Angeles they often have tile/concrete roofs, but I've read that in a situation like this the problem is the vents under the edge of the roof that lead into the attic: if anything burning gets through there, the house is toast.

Source: used to live in a Los Angeles hilly suburb. If the fires get to where I used to live, that house will definitely burn despite having a cement tile roof.

jandrewrogers9• 2 years ago

Houses almost all use wood framing. Rarely they use steel framing, which is more expensive and provides worse insulation. None use concrete or masonry because it is illegal to build a house that will collapse during a M7-8 earthquake. Like Japan, construction style in the western US is driven primarily by the requirement to be extremely seismic resistant, since that is a predictable and unavoidable risk.

In Southern California, it is typical to have tile roofs and stucco exteriors, which helps protect against the embers that will rain on your house during a major wildfire.

bloudermilk4• 2 years ago

The house was framed in 2x4 which is standard in most of the US. We did have modern fire resistant siding and roof tiles, but this was leagues beyond what any of those materials are designed for. It melted most of the steel around the property. Thank you for the kind words.

kamikazeturtles• 2 years ago

The National Guard - along with thousands of firefighters (many of them prisoners working for $10 a day or less) - have been deployed to help tackle the conflagration.

I hope their compensation is a little more than $10 a day! By the looks of the fire, those guys/gals are heros.

Stevvo• 2 years ago

Worse, upon release, none of them will be able to gain employment as a firefighter; you need a clean record for that.

throwup23815• 2 years ago

Nonviolent prisoners who have served as firefighters during their incarceration can have their records expunged since a 2021 law (and it’s retroactive): https://www.cdcr.ca.gov/facility-locator/conservation-camps/...

This was a big deal after the Camp and Complex fires because of some viral articles that drew well justified outrage among Californians so they went a step above and just allowed them to expunge their records completely (so that they can get hired everywhere else too, they don’t have to become fire fighters).

There are some stipulations like the sentence they served must be at most 8 years, but they’re not all banned from continuing their work.

anon2917• 2 years ago

Well good, since professional and volunteer firefighters are the most common arsonists. People with violent criminal records should not be in those fields at all.

mulmen28• 2 years ago

From the source link it's hard to tell if these prisoners are even working voluntarily. Prisoners can be enslaved under the 13th amendment.

s1artibartfast19• 2 years ago

They are volunteering and usually get time reduced for doing so.

Rebelgecko2• 2 years ago

There was a ballot proposition to increase imprisoned firefighter compensation in November but it failed 47/53

rafram• 2 years ago

With the fires still largely unconfined, and no sign of letup from the winds spreading the blazes, the loss of JPL is looking increasingly likely.

This is unsourced conjecture. If JPL actually burned, it would be a tragedy, but there's nothing to suggest that a massive, fenced, landscaped facility with a fire station literally at its gate [1] is in any real danger.

[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/B1F9ULKFrs7KvQa7A

onecommentman5• 2 years ago

We can look to the experience of Los Alamos National Labs during the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 to provide perspective.

ridgeguy• 2 years ago

Even at a remove of decades from when I worked at JPL, this makes me very sad.

jarsin2• 2 years ago

Now they are saying another fire broke out near hollywood hills. If winds don't stop how much worse can this get?

Sixth fire: A new brush fire called the Sunset Fire broke out in the Hollywood Hills near Runyon Canyon Wednesday evening. A mandatory evacuation order is in place for Laurel Canyon Boulevard (on the west) to Mulholland Drive (on the north) to 101 Freeway (on the east) down to Hollywood Boulevard (on the south).

zamalek• 2 years ago

how much worse can this get?

We have a climate change denier going into office, so we're going to find out.

pizza• 2 years ago

Many neighborhoods and landmarks along PCH in Malibu just gone. There's nothing left. Hard to fathom or overstate what the impact of all this will be. Every year I go down to the beach at sunrise on January 1st with my dad. We pulled over somewhere, don't know where, along the way, to catch the sunrise. Today when I first woke up I opened twitter and saw a video of the charred skeletons of the houses right where we were standing just one week ago. Recognized it from the background of the picture I took of him. Fucking insane.

edit: much of today has been giving me flashbacks of the Woolsey fire. the only way, probably, this fire today is better than the Woolsey fire, is that there likely won't be a mass shooting the very next day, like what happened back then, at the Borderline shooting.

motoxpro• 2 years ago

I remember that time. What a nightmare. Was saying the current one is probably the worst I have ever seen.

Used to go to that place all the time, friend was working when it happened.

anon2917• 2 years ago

California has a long history of failed forest management. At what point will the voters say enough is enough? But they keep electing the same people.

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010382535/gavin-newsom-misle...

7e• 2 years ago

Severe drought brought on my climate change is not going to be fixed by “forest management.” There is no forest around any of these fires.

lightedman3• 2 years ago

"There is no forest around any of these fires."

That is absolutely incorrect, the Los Angeles National Forest is currently on fire. I live here.

proc04• 2 years ago

People are blaming it on climate change, and making excuses for the state's management. When you point this out they get angry or passive aggressive like you are some kind of evil person like those evil republicans. It's unbelievable really.

kristjansson12• 2 years ago

We need to manage the forest! We need prescribed burns, fire roads, lookouts, etc. But we also need sensible development at the interface, stricter brush-clearance laws, emissions restrictions to attempt to mitigate climate change, etc.

But people get angry because 'forest management' has become a shorthand for the former without the latter (or in denial of the latter). It's been promulgated as an _alternative_ policy, not a _complimentary_ policy.

blackeyeblitzar• 2 years ago

It’s interesting to me how much attention these fires are getting because it affects relatively rich and tourist friendly areas. There are many, many wildfires every year across several states but most don’t even get their governor’s attention, let alone make national news. People seem shocked by what the fires can do but this is what many communities have had to deal with.

mulmen28• 2 years ago

When was the last time a fire of this scale and destruction occurred but wasn't headline news?

johanam• 2 years ago

For those in need of support or who want to donate, there are some resources at https://fireaid.info/

tobinfekkes• 2 years ago

A cousin works at JPL leading the Mars Rover program. Her house burnt down this afternoon :(

She's moved to an RV on her parent's property an hour away, temporarily. Thankful for backup option, but she put a lot of sweat and tears (and money) into fixing that little house up!

lend0006• 2 years ago

This saga has led me to do some research on the state of modern firefighting. From what I've gathered, we're still using the same methods (more or less) we've been using since the 1960's when Phos-Chek was introduced. There have been significant improvements in information (locating fires early with satellites and drones as such), which is no doubt valuable, but I was underwhelmed by the lack of advancements in actually putting out an aggressive fire. Perhaps someone who knows the state of the art can correct me.

However, I feel like there are some startup opportunities here, either for endpoint structure defense or firefighting equipment. There is a real need that will likely continue to grow over time.

Some things that came to mind: - Easily deployable, compressed CO2 canisters coordinated to smother fires from crossing strategic lines e.g. at a fire road on a ridge - More effective use of high powered drones for firefighting delivery - Use of special explosives or projectiles in remote / inaccessible terrain *yes, this comes with major caveats - Has materials science advanced to the point where we can launch reusable tarps on fires to smother them?

soared• 2 years ago

Those things might make sense if one building is on fire, but the scale of these fires and similarly sized forest fires make targeting individual building useless - there are hundreds or thousands of buildings on fire.

Forest fire fighting is pretty contentious, but we now have very specialized planes and helicopters that I assume didn’t exist decades ago. Similarly there are 747s that drop 20k gallons of fire retardant that I assume is new tech. Not sure if trenches are new or not, but also pretty common for forest fires.

vachina• 2 years ago

You do not want and cannot have a startup run these critical services. Just reeks of VC opportunists and cash grab.

lend0006• 2 years ago

Running critical services is a whole different thing than developing technology to sell to fire departments (which is already what happens, albeit with less innovation than I'd like to see).

lm284692• 2 years ago

We should stop believing tech can and will solve every single of our problems.

Between climate change, poor forest maintenance, poor infrastructure maintenance, building in risk areas, &c. it's all a matter of time. We're not gods and we will never be, we should have learned to live with our environment, not against it.

baq7• 2 years ago

Or perhaps build in a way that can survive a fire if you want to live in a bush fire prone area…? Maybe don’t plant eucalyptus on the yard, etc.

lend0006• 2 years ago

Why not both?

Plenty of well defended houses burned down this week -- don't underestimate just how fireproof your house needs to be to withstand something like this. And littering everything with fire retardants comes with a whole different set of health and environmental problems.

eesmith4• 2 years ago

That's an awful lot of CO2. You need it to stay there a long time, until the temperature gets below the ignition point, otherwise once the O2 comes back it will relight. You'll need it to get above the vegetation. You'll somehow need to prevent mixing of CO2 and O2 - remember, fires produce CO2 already.

CO2 is heavier than air. It will not stay on a ridge but will flow downslope.

CO2 is an invisible suffocation risk, as over 1,000 people near Lake Nyos learned back in the 1980s.

"High-powered drones" have nothing like the carrying capacity of large aircraft. If that was all that's needed then just buy the aircraft.

You'll need a lot of water, which will need to come from somewhere. Water is heavy.

Explosives have long been used for point fires, like oil and gas well fires, to deprive the fire of oxygen. You cannot blow up 100 acres of fire at once.

The Santa Ana winds are powerful. The plume of smoke above the fires shows how much energy is in the rising heated air. Any covering must handle all that power, and not be torn up, and not be burnt up.

For comparison, the biggest sailing ships had less 1.5 acres of sail, and the biggest wind turbines have a swept area of about 12 acres.

lend0006• 2 years ago

CO2 is a major hazard, but of all the ideas listed and that I've read elsewhere, it does seem to have the most potential when the hazards are managed. That and tarps (instead of throwing them on the fire, perhaps laying them down to create strategic barriers to the spread of the fire).

But it's undoubtedly a very hard engineering challenge. Some of the photos of the fire show the flames dwarfing the planes used to drop retardant.

pluto_modadic• 2 years ago

this has to be parody. what?!

lend0006• 2 years ago

I genuinely don't understand what happened to HN. When did curiosity, hypothetical discussion, and an interest in solving problems with technology become a source of derision and insecurity? Are you on the right forum?

codezero• 2 years ago

Wildfires of this magnitude are not fixed by larger fire fighting forces, but by preventative measures.

renewiltord• 2 years ago

It’s grown quite far actually. We have family who had to evacuate in the Hollywood Hills.

pstorm• 2 years ago

That’s a new fire as of a couple hours ago - Sunset Fire. There are 5 going on in LA at the moment.

deegles• 2 years ago

I live thousands of miles away and I can't help but wonder what natural disaster will hit me, eventually.

vFunct• 2 years ago

After hurricane Andrew Florida changed their building codes to account for hurricanes. But can California do the same for wildfires? Is it even possible to construct fireproof homes? (With stone construction or whatever?)

LeoPanthera• 2 years ago

It’s absolutely possible, at least in theory, but it’s a lot more expensive. Concrete, stucco, brick, and (some types of) cement are fire resistant. Roofs can be made of metal, clay, or (some types of) asphalt.

Not all fire-resistant materials are also earthquake-resistant.

We had roof-mounted sprinklers installed on our house in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We haven’t had to test them in anger so far, but apparently they really work.

jeroenhd2• 2 years ago

Even without changing construction materials, you can protect houses from many forest fires by making sure there's no flammable material anywhere close to your house. That requires space, which also comes at a premium, but it may still be cheaper than having to build earthquake-resistant concrete everywhere.

A lot of lives and properties (though certainly not all) can be saved if people and cities followed recommendations like https://www.nfpa.org/en/education-and-research/wildfire/prep... but measures like that can be unpopular (because people like to have pretty homes with plants near them) or expensive (because people, cities and property developers would need to set apart "unused" land to separate houses from vegetation).

curiousgal2• 2 years ago

Is it even possible to construct fireproof homes?

Of course you can. This is a solved problem. The US chooses to use lumber because it's cheap and fast. You get what you paid for.

Many poor countries use hollow red clay bricks for construction, which are fire proof. You don't need to break the bank to build a fire resistant house. It's just like with most think in the U.S., the "system" is built in a certain way to benefit certain establishments.

jeroenhd2• 2 years ago

Lumber construction is hardly the only factor. Greece commonly uses brick/stones/cement but was hit heavily by forest fires. The things in/on/surrounding those unflammable materials can still light on fire and destroy homes. On the other hand, well-prepared lumber houses often survive forest fires in America and Australia.

Unlike brick or concrete, wood is easy to make earthquake resistant, which is very relevant in a state like California. No point in building a flame resistant building that crumbles to dust within a year when it's hit by a minor earthquake.

baq7• 2 years ago

You can use bricks but you still need to tear everything down if the fire comes close to the building because pipes and wires can’t be made from bricks - nowadays, it’s all plastic except the copper.

But… if you build a brick wall and keep your yard fire proof, you have a shot.

usrnm• 2 years ago

What are the chances that the affected areas will be rebuilt with something else than single family homes? Something denser

dataflow• 2 years ago

Realistically -- how likely is this to go into the city? What is likely to stop it, if not water (given they're running short)?

freen• 2 years ago

Climate change is watching photos of disasters start at a great distance from you, but year after year they get closer and closer until you are there, taking the picture yourself.

prennert• 2 years ago

This is probably a naive question because I am not local, but how usual are wild fires during the winter?

There seems to be snow large parts of the US and freezing temperatures. In LA it is currently 8°C (46°F), which is not freezing, but also not hot.

Does this suggest even bigger fires are to be expected in the summer this year when it is actually hot?

eric-hu• 2 years ago

Grew up in LA. I don't recall wildfires in the winter, generally. There were Santa Ana Winds this past week though, and I'm pretty sure that's the cause. In the mountains near me, wind speeds were said to be 80-100 mph. They were probably lower where I am, but my neighbor's backyard canopy blew over the wall to my backyard. I helped them hoist it back over the wall today and we estimated it was about 100 lbs.

These are gusty and dry winds coming from the desert, so I assume these fires spread from some manmade source.

Does this suggest even bigger fires are to be expected in the summer this year when it is actually hot?

I would assume so, yes. Some insurers have been pulling out of CA in 2024.

BlueTemplar3• 2 years ago

The issue here seems to be that human memory is going to be just short enough to be dangerously useless against a natural phenomenon that is decently regular, but happens in a 30 to 150 years intervals.

(See also : epidemics ?)

nonelog• 2 years ago

I find it astounding how almost nobody points out the obvious: Arson.

harmmonica5• 2 years ago

They rarely happen in winter (in modern times at least) because it usually rains starting in late fall. But there's been zero measurable precipitation since, I think, May 2024. It's that issue combined with the extreme winds this week that made the conditions on the ground ripe for this type of fire. Note that the winds themselves are somewhat typical (they're called Santa Ana winds and they happen every year like clockwork), but the severity of the winds this week was extreme. Don't think there have been winds as severe in decades. It was a somewhat predictable cocktail and all of these ingredients aided the severity. No moisture + high winds = high fire risk. High winds = embers easily carried forward igniting additional fires. High winds = grounded firefighting planes and helicopters.

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

Relatively rare, but SoCal in particular sees dry-ish winters and high, dry winds, the Santa Anas. Humidity has been in the single or low-double digits. During the recent Malibu fires I saw a 7% RH reading, in the past week ~17%. Both of those are quite dry.

Much of the area sees repeat fires at ~20 year intervals or so. Several of the fire maps I was looking at were showing prior burns within the past five years, of which there were several in the vicinity of the Palisades fire. I've yet to check back to see how the burned-over areas fared in the current burn, but I'm suspecting that even recent fire activity is no longer the protection it once was.

Ironically, heavy rains in recent years can also compound fire hazard as the precipitation promotes plant growth and hence fuel load. Unless rain is recent (within the past 14-30 days or so) it's not going to be protective.

Keep in mind that average annual precip in Los Angeles is less than 15 inches (38 cm). San Francisco sees roughly double that, and isn't a particularly high-rainfall region itself.

<https://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we13.php>

A midwestern location such as Chicago sees 50 inches (127 cm):

<https://www.weather.gov/lot/chicago_climate_records>

Moreover, California's precipitation tends to be concentrated into a relatively small number of storms, mostly between November and May.

beernet• 2 years ago

This is sad, devastating, and not surprising. Yet, people voted for policies that will further accelerate climate change and its consequential destructions in the next four years. As someone not living in the US, this is unbelievable to witness. Where did it all go wrong inside of people's heads?

nprateem• 2 years ago

Because no one thinks their house will burn down or flood, or that they will starve.

We're supposed to be self-interested individuals, but sadly most people only seem to wake up the moment their own safety is directly threatened.

Such a shame that 50 years of climate warnings have done practically nothing to stop us reaching the tipping point. If we aren't there yet, we will be in our lifetimes no doubt.

Xenoamorphous• 2 years ago

Most people that voted for Trump I’d say is not that they don’t think climate change will affect them, it’s that they don’t think there’s climate change at all, or even if it there is, it’s not caused by humans.

immibis5• 2 years ago

"climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it" - @PerthshireMags on ex-twitter

baxtr2• 2 years ago

Such a tragedy. I am very sorry for anyone affected by this :(

As a non-local it’s hard to judge how big this is. Can anyone point to map or explain to what extend LA is affected?

Is it 5% of the area/population or rather 50%?

input_sh• 2 years ago

https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents.html

Not particularly snappy, but feature-packed. You can see evacuation zones, look at live cameras, see which parts have already burned to the ground, see which parts are in danger.

harmmonica5• 2 years ago

I saw a sibling comment posted a link to a map, but I wanted to provide you some context. As you can see on those maps, these fires are quite big in terms of land area/acreage. The thing it's important to understand about Los Angeles, though, is that there's a "mountain" range that runs east/west literally right through the city itself (mountain in quotes because as it bisects the city the mountains aren't very tall). Where it bisects the city itself you may recognize the names of some of the areas with houses plastered all over the "mountain:" Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills, Bel Air. As you get east and west of the city, though, those mountains get a bit taller and way less populated. The Palisades fire, the first one that started, is the literal western/northwestern end of the city of LA. Its northern border is, albeit low elevation in mountain terms, mountainous and is more or less the definition of urban/wildland interface. That's part of the reason the fire spread so quickly, though in this case not even the primary reason. The other major fire is not in the city of LA, but just north of the city of Pasadena, which is east of Los Angeles. But the geography/topography is nearly identical (down to a similar east/west mountain range, but with much taller mountains). A majority of the area that's burning out of control there is largely mountainous with very little habitation (if anyone who lost a home there reads this, I don't mean to diminish how much damage has occurred in Altadena; I'm just pointing out that the massive land area of the fire is not representative of the impact on inhabited areas).

baxtr2• 2 years ago

Thank you so much for this detailed comment!

Very insightful and helpful for me to get the right context.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Can someone explain what efforts will be made to rebuild if any? How could they rebuild knowing this can just happen again next year? It’s not like hurricanes where buildings can be made to withstand category 5 storms.

leoedin• 2 years ago

Buildings can be built to higher levels of wildfire resistance.

The fire spreads because burning embers are blown downwind, settling and starting new spot fires. If they get blown into a house, the house burns. You don't need to make a house fireproof to stop wildfires, but just resistant to a shower of burning embers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvbNOPSYyss

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

Ok so they will rebuild

gadflyinyoureye• 2 years ago

I hear how Californian laws make building difficult. I also hear that there is housing shortage. Will the complex and possibly convoluted build process limit the restoration of burnt communities?

For example, my understanding is that all new home construction requires solar. I assume that is about $60,000. Then the permitting process is something like $50-100,000. That is a sizable chunk of the insurance money just to meet new code.

consumer4515• 2 years ago

People have lost their lives and many more have lost their homes.

Elon Musk has chimed-in on the matter. I don't post this flippantly. As a huge fan of Tesla and SpaceX, someone please explain to me what is happening.

https://i.redd.it/iasdlw98tzbe1.png

kristjansson12• 2 years ago

Apparently a fire chief wrote in her boilerplate online bio that her top priority was equity and inclusion with the fire department, so clearly firefighting wasn't her top priority, so clearly the entire disaster is her fault, and so DEI caused the wildfire.

consumer4515• 2 years ago

Baltimore bridge disaster, Musk: DEI. Nothing supporting that.

Alaska Flight 1282, door blows off, Musk: DEI. Nothing supporting that.

I want an electrified future. I want a multi-planet civilization.

Read Alex Jones' text that Musk says is "true." It is objectively insane.

Why is he doing this? He is discrediting the species-level important things. He used to be the best of us, the clearest thinker. What in the heck happened?

jarsin2• 2 years ago

Won't be long until Jones is saying this tragedy is all CGI. Then Musk will give him a "100%" reply.

worik• 2 years ago

Lots of blame to go around. But in the end, it all comes back to climate change

LA wildfires force thousands to evacuate, NASA JPL closed

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